“People don’t put their Blundstones on to lie on the lounge, people put their Blundstones on to go and do something.” Find out how one brand turned ‘doing something’ into a lively global conversation.

If you’ve grown up in Australia sometime in the last 147 years, there’s every chance you’ve owned, or at least admired somebody else’s, Blundstone boots.

The thriving company has cultivated a rich storytelling narrative around their products, which can today be found anywhere from the cattle stations of the Australian Outback, to the trendy boutique clothing stores of Brooklyn, New York.

“When you’re 147 years old you don’t make a brand up, you actually have to work very hard to capture the truth of it from a worldwide community of very loyal consumers and boot wearers,” says Adam Blake, global head of brand design and customer engagement at Blundstone.

Blundstone’s foundations and connection to honest work has fostered a culture of authenticity which has bled into many of Blundstone’s marketing strategies.

“We ended up with our brand narrative, our tagline of ‘everywhere life takes me’ because we felt that it was spoken in the consumer’s voice, not ours. So it’s not us as a brand speaking at people, it’s our consumers and boot wearers speaking to the world.”

Adam says it’s served them particularly well on social media, where they’ve been able to acquire a wealth of user-generated content, and enrich the brand’s narrative with new stories from across the world.

“We’re not having to spend millions of dollars on content. We’re getting lots of very genuine content. It’s not actors. It’s not talent. It’s real people doing real things. So we feel that’s very valuable,” he said.

In this episode of the CMO Show, Nicole and Mark sit down with Blundstone’s Adam Blake to talk the convergence of storytelling and community in building your brand.

MJ:That’s all right. Thank you for joining us on the show. I am really excited about this and I do mean excited because well I’m a fan. I’m just going to fanboy moment. We’re going to talk about Blundstones or Blunnies.

NM:I love these things. The quintessential Australian product.

MJ:Yes.

NM:Just sensible. If you mean business you put your boots on.

MJ:That’s right. The company is a Tasmanian brand. It’s been around for more than 100 – coming up to 150 years and it’s an interesting story at a couple of levels. We’ve got a brand firstly that’s been around for that amount of time. It’s growing internationally and they’re using storytelling so it ticks all the boxes really from an interest…

NM:Yes.

MJ:…point of view. So I’m really keen to find out how are they using storytelling in business to grow the brand, particularly in the United States?

NM:Yes. They’ve got a great digital story which is – it’s been rather measured and well thought out and not too gimmicky. They’ve really, really put some effort into it.

MJ:That’s right. I think when we say integrated storytelling it means being able to bring a consistent set of messages in your story through multiple channels. It’s quite complex but they’re doing it.

MJ:So without much further ado let’s hear from our guest today Adam Blake, global head of brand design and consumer engagement at Blundstone. Adam thanks for joining us.

Mark Jones:If you’ve got a question you’d like us to answer on the show, just tweet us @CMOShow or use the hashtag #TheCMOShow. We’d love to hear from you.

MJ:Adam thanks for joining us.

AB:Thank you for having me.

MJ:Now this interview has come about because I noticed you guys online. I’ve seen that there’s a push going into America. Very interesting backstory. Blundstone established in Tasmania more than 100 years ago and presumably gone through all sorts of seasons of change. Just kick us off by, tell us the story of Blundstone, where you’re at right now in the journey on the history of the company.

NM:Kick us off, was that a small pun – iconic boot framed pun?

MJ:Thank you Nicole. That was completely subconscious.

AB:Yes. I’ll take a step forward then.

NM:Awesome.

AB:There you go. There’s lots of puns in footwear. Look we’re 147 years old so we’re starting to get excited about our 150th birthday party. The story of Blundstone started in the 1850s when two families sailed out from England to Tasmania which was really still a penal colony and coming out of its penal colony past at that point. They were both involved in a range of businesses when they got here but both were into importing and making shoes. That started the beginnings of the business. Tasmania – I don’t know how many of our listeners know but it’s a very isolated, very small island. The next continent from us is Antarctica. So it’s an incredibly beautiful, very wild nature filled island but also very hard environment and hard seasons to live through.

So right from the beginning Blundstone as the local trusted shoemaker or bootmaker made boots for men, women and children but they had to not only be beautiful but they had to be incredibly durable and stand up to some of the toughest conditions. We’d like to think on a product sense that that has continued to this day so that everything we bring out really we have a design criteria that we run over it that ensures that it is beautiful and that we’re using beautiful materials. But that it’s also incredibly durable and able to stand up to anyone’s life journey.

MJ:Yes. That’s great. I remember even as a child when I got my first pair of Blunnies as we call them…

AB:Yes.

MJ:…was going hang on you mean I can walk through oil and petrol and – it’s got the qualifiers on the bottom and that’s been a feature of them too right, the safety?

AB:That’s correct. In Australia we’re still predominantly a work and safety brand so it’s quite an interesting brand position we find ourselves in where we’re now bigger overseas than we are at home in Australia and that’s a recent changing of the proportions. But in Australia we’re very much known for and have been part of the Australian psyche really as a work boot and we still have a very large range of industrial boots that we make for Australia. Whereas overseas the U.S. has some work products but essentially overseas internationally we’re known much more what we call lifestyle because we get a bit scared by the F word of fashion. So we’re more a lifestyle product or a life and style product and that’s very much the brand identity everywhere else in the world.

MJ:Yes.

AB:Obviously brands like ours go through should we break our brand into separate sub-brands that speak to those different segments? But we’re proud of the fact that we still make some of the best safety boots in the world and what we learn from doing that we can build into the same boots that people wear on the streets in New York…

MJ:Yes.

AB:…and that’s very much part of our heritage and it will always be I suspect.

MJ:Yes. From a marketing perspective would you describe the brand as premium? Would you occupy the top shelf or how do you think about that?

AB:It’s probably half a shelf below the ultimate top shelf. We’re sort of middle class premium maybe. But we feel that as a brand we’re accessible and approachable but yes we are in the premium end in terms of price and the quality of our goods that we make. I think again these days in the market there seems to be quite a polarisation now where you’ve got a lot of very cheap products and premium products. We proudly put ourselves in the premium product and certainly in our work and safety boots in Australia they’re premium too.

MJ:That’s great. So with all of that context in mind tell us about where you’re going now and what’s ahead.

AB:Over the last couple of years really we’ve invested a lot of energy into really capturing our brand. I mean when you’re 147 years old you don’t make a brand up, you actually have to work very hard to capture the truth of it from a worldwide community of very loyal consumers and boot wearers. So we’ve spent a lot of time really trying to understand what the brand means for us and what our values are and make sure that they’re captured in the brand. But importantly what our end users and our consumers say the brand means to them. So that led us to an approach that really was based around telling our brand through the stories of the people who wear our boots.

I have the pleasure of if I get on a plane and someone sits next to me and asks who I work for and I say “Blundstone” I usually end up hearing their life story for the rest of the plane ride.

Blundstone’s become inextricably linked with people’s life experiences or life journeys whether it’s someone travelling or riding their motorbike or their work or even a street urban explorer or going to a music festival. Blundstones seem to be a brand that finds its way into being a part of people’s story. So we decided really to stand back and say let’s frame our whole brand through that, through that lens and really get – it also helps us as a business and a brand to force us to really get to know and understand our consumers and our end users

MJ:That’s a great insight. My mind literally just went to my childhood experience with relatives, visiting them on a farm and rounding up sheep. I just went straight to that with my Blunnies. That was the childhood experience. I think it’s fascinating.

NM:It sounds like an experience brand. It’s not a fashion label. I was going to say before perhaps it’s the authenticity that you don’t want to lose by if you were to use the F word as you say by saying fashion. But it actually sounds like an experience brand the way you describe it. That everybody was doing something, is doing something, is being there wearing these boots.

AB:Yes. I think that’s really true and we have a saying here that people don’t put their Blundstones on to lie on the lounge. Generally people put their Blundstones on to go and do something and as I said that can be a range of things. Blundstones sort of speak to people’s way of life, their philosophy, the experiences they live. We ended up with our brand narrative, our tagline of everywhere life takes me because we felt that it was spoken in the consumer’s voice, not ours. So it’s not us as a brand speaking at people, it’s our consumers and boot wearers speaking to the world. That everywhere life takes me Blundstone’s there.

It also very importantly allowed us not to be boxed in to one consumer segment or retail channel or category. When we travel the world and speak with our distributors and retailers around the world they will often say you’re an amazing brand, you refuse to be boxed in to any one category or any one channel. So we can be sitting in a high street fashion store and at the same time sitting in the farm store down the road. It’s just one of the magic things of Blundstone and it’s because as we’ve just spoken about it’s an experience brand and we feel that’s really important rather than just selling a product because we aren’t a fast fashion producer. We’re like slow food. We make beautiful things that take time to cook.

NM:So Tasmanian of you to say that.

AB:Yes, I know. So I think that we’re very conscious of that and so we’re not competing on price and on speed and churn in a fashion sense. Even though we sell in fashion channels we’re competing on being a brand the people buy into and can see themselves in. So that integrated approach that we’re using in the U.S. which is what we’re using here in Australia and Canada – our distributors in Canada are very good at it too. It really looks at taking that overarching tagline or narrative, everywhere life takes me and then finding the sorts of people and allowing them to tell their story or us to capture that story and create it with them…

MJ:Yes.

AB:…through our influencers, through – in Australia we’ve got influencers that range from farmers to chefs to surfboard makers, to car drivers, to musicians. The U.S. similar but it also has recently struck up a partnership with an online publication called Kinfolk that is a very authentic lifestyle storytelling publication. So that’s a channel we can use. In Canada they’ve released their Blundstone 2017 soundtrack where they’ve actually got Blundstone loving musicians found in each province of Canada and they’ve created and sort of given a song in some ways to Blundstone.

MJ:Yes. It’s like creating a playlist.

AB:That’s right. It’s the Blundstone playlist – no one’s bought those songs. We’ve actually got to know and used real people, real musicians, who love and wear Blundstones so the nice part about this brand approach is that we find people are very generous in sharing their stories.

MJ:Tell us other aspects of the campaign. So what other elements have you included above and below the line?

AB:Obviously social is ever growing, social media. Instagram being a storytelling channel is really important for us. So creating Instagram stories when we’re actually at activations as well. So we’ve activated it in the U.S. at film festivals. We are very present at music festivals in Australia. So we can be a part of those scenes and sort of marketing the brand as a genuine – a brand that deserves to be there which is very important to us, not forcing our way into situations where we don’t belong. Then the visual brand identity has now become – so that everywhere life takes me the brand templates and the collateral that really focus on genuine photos of people adventuring, exploring, doing their thing in their Blundstones so we can drive that.

NM:What’s the fallout or what’s the gain from a really good content driven campaign for you guys? I mean if you’re getting content from people who’ve already got their favourite pair of Blunnies where do you see the money come in?

AB:Number one is that in a harsh marketing sense we’re not having to spend millions of dollars on content. We’re getting lots of very genuine content so that’s quite important to us that it’s not staged. It’s not actors. It’s not talent. It’s real people doing real things. So we feel that’s very valuable. We can then use that and drive that across our digital platforms or into stores as a way of inviting new Blundstone consumers to the table. So as I said that idea about shopping the experience, signing up for the brand to be part of that community and that lifestyle. So we can use the user-generated content to really send a message probably better than we could to new consumers.

NM:Are your new consumers more likely to buy online than they are in store?

AB:In the U.S. I would say yes. It’s quite interesting for us opening up and moving into America, where we found that the retailers expected us as a brand to be online and to be active online so that people can purchase from the brand. There’s still a good swag of people who like to go into a shop to buy a shoe because feet are so unique.

The issue for us is our boots last so long so we really have to encourage people to want to have a pair of the red ones as well as the brown ones and a pair of the new summer ones as well as your snow/winter ones.

MJ:Yes and the fashion ones and the back of the garden…

AB:Correct.

MJ:…you know, dirty ones.

NM:The ones you use when you’re mowing.

MJ:Yes. I actually have a good pair and a bad pair which is – my bad pair is they’re basically wrecked and the soles are a bit overexposed and then you’ve got the good pair that you can actually go out in. So yes, I’m with you. Can I go just back a step and you were talking about the story? Because what’s interesting about your journey is the connection points that you have with your customers and these partners – and you’re inviting them to tell their story – as you think about that what makes a great story and from a brand perspective? I think of this as the brand becoming a storyteller. So it’s almost like in your role you’re the chief storyteller at Blundstone. What makes a great story?

AB:Yes, we spend a lot of time, a lot of time, thinking about this and talking about it and it’s one of these things that you often know it just when you see a piece of content and think wow that’s it. I think for us it’s the connection to the sort of honesty of – this sounds very cliché – but because of the sort of brand we are it is – authenticity is almost a given. It has to be genuine. So the sort of content that really allows us or the sort of imagery that really allows you a window into what the person’s doing and what that person seems to stand for in terms of their lifestyle or their persona the more we can get to that the better the stories are.

So we recently made a story with two – we call them influencers but they’re sort of more than that and when people get beyond an influencer we call them part of the family. So they’re called the Vos brothers and they actually rose to minor celebrity fame in Australia because they won a home renovation show. But we knew about them already. They’re young guys. They’re really talented. They’re surfers. They’re adventurers. They’ve grown up in Tasmania. Their family, the Vos family, is a building company family down here. So for us we like those stories that also speak to the broader church of Blundstone.

So their stories speak to the worksite of our businesses as much as it does to the fashionable side as much as it does to the sort of lifestyle adventure side because of how they live. So we made a video with them down here in Tasmania really showcasing them and their family and their heritage and their connection to the wild of Tasmania. To me that’s a really good story because it says a lot about our brand through them.

MJ:What’s the experience like trying to make sure that you get this consistent narrative in your story given the number of channels that are out there and the different products you’ve got going on? There’s a lot of moving parts in there. Do you just kind of let it take care of itself or have you got an approach to keeping that theme and that narrative running?

AB:Yes, we certainly don’t leave it to itself. In Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. we are the distributor, we are the sales force and the distributor and the team. In every other country in the world we’re working through a distributor, a third party distributor. So what we’ve developed is we call it our global brand management framework and we’ve developed a very good manual, a bit like a manual you get with a car. A very good manual about how to work with the brand, how to represent the stories in the way we want them, how to understand and use the pillars et cetera. We call it a medium flex model so it still allows the distributor who knows their market much more than we do to flavour it and tailor it to their market.

How do you translate a storytelling brand into a very technical, traditional work and safety market and channel? So that’s a real challenge for us. But yes, we have understood and accepted that the responsibility of being the custodian of the brand and working with third parties whose job it is to grow that brand in their market is that it’s our responsibility to provide assets, to provide rich explanations about the brand and how we expect – we give them guides on the sorts of influencers. We give them examples of how we go do a point of sale campaign in Australia with everywhere life takes me. We give them kits about how we activate at a music festival et cetera. So we sort of try to guide but not control.

MJ:Just on Amazon what impact do you think that will have as far as the buyer journey and your understanding of how consumer habits are changing. That’s really my question.

AB:I think in some ways I’d rather see it as setting a benchmark that all of our sells and our authorised online resellers or retailers need to step up to the plate in terms – it certainly made us do a lot of thinking about what the level of consumer experience and satisfaction should be with our brand.

As I said buying boots can be a hard thing to get right online so just the concept of Amazon and Zappos where they send you multiple pairs and you just send the others back and all sorts of things like that that – because we know it’s such a disruption to the consumer experience and the consumer journey if they get the boots and they don’t fit the first time. You might get one more try and if that doesn’t work they’re gone.

NM:That’s a whole family you might be missing out on given the way your customers tend to buy.

AB:Yes. America’s far ahead of Australia culturally in terms of buying online but we’re fast catching up and all I’ve got to do is look at my own kids at home and watch what they expect of a brand. So that tie-up between the digital stories and the digital experience of the brand and then ensuring that also appears consistently in a store, in a bricks and mortar store, but then also ensuring that their experience online is good and that’s hard. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment about trying to frame what we expect our online retail partners to do in terms of how they present the brand and how they work with – what sort of customer service. What sort of customer experience they give people.

AB:I think a series of changes happened for the business over the last 10 years or more in terms of really as our growth started to kick in and also as we moved into having manufacturing partners around the world. I think the honest answer would be there was probably a lot of logistical learning for us as a business. Also because we have been very much a maker business – for 130 years Blundstone knew how to make leather and make boots and that was the competency. We suddenly found ourselves in a different world but we’re now growing in all these countries around the world, becoming popular, trying to figure out which channels we actually belonged in and trying to supply the right product. That was another issue. And then also getting the logistics of how do we make this around the world and get it to all of these markets on time? That’s a fairly honest answer to the journey of the company and I think we’re petty honest that we’re also still learning about being a global brand. We’ve gone from being a maker to logistics to a brand custodian and brand manager.

MJ:Yes. So distribution and logistics isn’t easy right so that – and then when you start driving demand through your marketing efforts and the sorts of storytelling that we’ve been speaking about clearly you’ve got to fulfil.

AB:That’s right.

MJ:So that’s an interesting aspect to your story.

AB:Yes. It’s beautiful doing all of the content and the brand work. There’s not a day goes by that I can forget the fact that we’re managing an enormous production and logistics business behind that. If you disappoint on that level as you just said you don’t just win on pretty stories. So you can’t afford to not do that well. You’ve got to do that well almost as your foundation to then move into being a brand, a storytelling experience brand.

MJ:Yes, got it.

NM:That’s a powerful lesson there.

MJ:So where to from here? What’s the future looking like for you? We’ve been talking about your marketing journey, the storytelling journey and logistics and kind of building this thing. What does the future look like for you around how you want to steer and create the Blundstone story?

AB:In terms of an approach to growth we’re learning a lot in the U.S. about that sort of rather than just looking at the U.S. as one big market and how we’re going to push the brand sort of uniformly. Obviously the U.S. has very influential cities or states so we’ve probably started stronger on the east coast but growing on the west now. But inside of cities so inside of New York we’ve now really honed down to say doing activations and work in Brooklyn as an influential part of New York that will drive and send influence into other parts. So that’s really interesting that sort of micro growth strategy that adds up to starting to influence and spread the brand from right down to individual people and stories and places.

So that’s interesting and I think that’s possibly a model we can share with new markets and new distributors. We have one of the lovely side-effects of doing well is we have lots of people starting to come to us now and saying they want to distribute our brand in new markets. We’re quite measured about how many we take on at any time because we’re conscious of our ability to resource that as a brand manager and a partner and we’re also conscious of the logistics and the supply. So we take a fairly measured way of growing. But I think the brand is really starting to take hold in Europe. It’s been there for a long time but it’s really starting to take hold in places where it wasn’t for a long time.

We have more and more designers and other brands also wanting to collaborate with us and so we feel like we’ve got a good antenna for how to assess who we partner with. A lot of it based around values and sort of heritage and so that’s great. I think that’s really exciting because that is they’re not just the end users that we can tell stories or partner with but we can start partnering with other brands. So you have the one plus one equals three sort of potential for us. That’s starting to increase and it’s really exciting the sort of brands that want to partner with us.

It’s not easy running a business from a small island in the middle of nowhere so we have a lot of people flying around the world all the time now so I often ponder what the future might look like far away. We do have a team in the U.S. but we don’t have a team of our own in Europe. So is Blundstone going to need to have a global – a bit more corporate presence around the world? Who knows? I think our big thing is in terms of people and stories I mean as I said the stories of the distributors who’ve found us and have loved the brand and poured their hard work and life into growing it and selling it a lot of that happened just through a very intuitive connection and people being drawn to the brand.

But as we go forward we really want to understand how we can make sure we partner with the right people. As we get more popular more people want to partner but we want to make sure we really understand how we find the right people to grow our brand in a market that we don’t understand as much as they do. So that’s really testing us at the moment, how to know the right people to work with.

NM:How do you make sure that they’re genuine? How do you make sure that you’re not aligning with someone who perhaps at their heart has practices that aren’t so family friendly or aren’t particularly sustainable or perhaps don’t really support that I think of Tasmania – personally I think of the beautiful wilderness and I think of agriculture and all of those things. How do you make sure that they align with your values?

AB:That’s a really good and timely question for us. A couple of years ago we started asking ourselves this and once you move into being a global – managing a global supply chain immediately the ethics and the environment come to the fore. Because we remain to this day a family business the aim of this business it to continue to grow the potential of it to hand onto generations. That is the aim of the game for us. So you can only do that if you do the right things. You don’t hand on a bad egg to the next generation. You don’t destroy today for the opportunity tomorrow.

So we actually take this really seriously and then we start saying well that’s all well and good to have it as a value set and that we intuitively do it but actually the world now demands a lot more transparency and wants you to show how you’re doing that. So we’ve set up a program internally and so all of our partners in the direct supply chain – and we’re starting to work with our distributors and working with our printers and all of the people we work with to produce things that have Blundstone on it. We actually go through an audit process with them to ensure that there’s the right ethical and standards. We actually have people employed directly by us placed at the factories to ensure that the quality is adhered to but also the standards of how they treat people and who they employ.

NM:It’s like validating it, not just taking your word for it.

AB:That’s right – it’s a very Tasmanian character to be modest and we’re not a showy company and we’re not a showy brand. So we don’t do it just for show. We’ve actually got a growing team of people who spend their time looking at this and when we bring on new distributors now we’re giving them a document that says if you want to do business with us we are going to expect this level of transparency and this level of doing things the right way for us to work together. So it’s becoming easier and it’s incredible. We get requests from markets, New Zealand, England recently where they’re saying we have a retailer who will only take our product if you can show them this information. So it’s coming back up from the retail street level as well.

MJ:Well Adam it sounds like you’ve got lots of good problems to deal with. Managing growth as they say has its challenges but it’s a great place to be. I’m particularly encouraged by the way that you’ve embedded authentic storytelling into the heart of your marketing approach and I really appreciate the insights that you brought to it. So thank you very much for your time.

AB:Thank you.

MJ:Before we let you go we love to do a rapid-fire round of questions just to get to know you a little bit more. Are you ready?

AB:I’m ready.

NM:What are you grateful for?

AB:As an Australian I can say hand on heart I’m actually grateful and honoured to work for Blundstone. I mean it’s a brand that has a very deep connection with coming from Australia.

NM:Who’s your hero?

AB:I have quite a lot of admiration for the founder and CEO of Patagonia I have to say and the way he’s grown a business out of pure passion and understanding his community and then the way he treats his people. He’s a real business hero.

MJ:That’s fascinating. I was going to ask you about Patagonia early on when you talk about story because a lot of what you’re doing is actually reflected in the way they go to market.

AB:Yes. I mean they’re admirable because they’re just so committed to their single focus and they stand behind it so heavily.

MJ:If you weren’t a marketer you’d be a?

AB:A storyteller to children which is actually how I started my life teaching.

NM:This sounds like a story in itself. Favourite book?

AB:Unbearable Lightness of Being.

MJ:If there’s one thing you could change about the marketing or branding industry what would it be?

AB:The speed. The speed at which the market demands things. Yes, I think that’s just part and parcel of the world these days. Look I actually wouldn’t ask it to change a lot. What I think is quite exciting is when I speak to my kids about this that they all – if there’s a beautiful story told which is an advertisement they will accept that that’s an advertisement but still enjoy it as a beautiful piece of content as much as a movie or a short film. So I think it’s in our hands as marketers to produce stuff that people love and see themselves in.

NM:I don’t think we could ask for a better sentiment than that.

MJ:Last question. If you were to change your name what would you change it to?

AB:Wow. That’s an unusual question.

NM:You should see the ones we haven’t asked you.

AB:Yes, well – the first animal I got was a cat and I called him Max because I think secretly I wanted to be called Max.

MJ:Nice.

NM:Is an excellent name.

MJ:Well not so secretly your name is Adam Blake and as global head of brand design and consumer engagement at Blundstone you’ve given us incredible insights, taught us a lot of things about how to engage with consumers. Thank you for your time and all that you brought to the table today, really appreciate you being on the CMO Show.

NM:Such a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks.

AB:Thank you very much for having me. It’s been great!

MJ:There you go Nicole, Adam Blake. What do you reckon?

NM:Authentic. Capital A authentic.

MJ:Yes.

NM:Not just the storytelling or using your customers as brand advocates because you get several million photos of what I presume are feet sitting in sand or at a campfire or something. But authentic like down to the supply chain level.

MJ:Yes.

NM:That was really interesting to me that they wanted to verify everything.

MJ:Yes. Yes, I agree. It’s interesting that we have this creative aspect of storytelling that’s coming through from customers but at the same time he’s got a really interesting framework that he described around the brand, the brand narrative, the brand story and an architecture even and then how they saw the customers in that. Particularly there was also the vetting of the influencers and finding people that align. It’s actually quite reassuring to hear that they’ve been able to develop a set of processes and a decision making framework for making this happen.

NM:It’s like craftsmanship.

MJ:Yeah! It’s a great story, it’s an inspiring one too, Aussie does good.

NM:Yes. He’s really down to earth.

MJ:Fantastic conversation and good to see a really great brand storytelling campaign. The reference too to Patagonia which is another company doing some great work in this space so there’s a really interesting uptake in growth in companies that are thinking okay how can we get storytelling integrated through all of our activities from a marketing point of view? That’s the kind of stuff that gets me up in the morning.

NM:I love the fact that it’s sort of accelerating or elevating Australian companies.

MJ:Yes.

NM:Because there is that attention to detail and quality. It’s part of that story that means that they’ve got a future no matter how global the world becomes.

MJ:Well that wraps it up for the CMO Show this time. Thanks for joining us.

NM:We’ve had an awesome time and don’t just stop with one when you can consume all the other shows.

MJ:Until next time. And also a quick shout out to our partners, our syndication partners, of the CMO Show, Adobe’s CMO.com…

NM:Beautifully named.

MJ:Thank you, yes. It’s a digital publication for digital leaders.

NM:Okay. So that’s everyone, that’s not just your CIOs or your CMOs, it’s pretty much everybody in that suite.

MJ:That’s right. Anyone who’s interested in global leadership and particularly in the Asia Pacific where we’re seeing a lot of activity in terms of growth of marketing. So yes, a bit of a shout out to our friends at Adobe and jump on there and have a look at what they’ve got to offer.